After maybe a dozen attempts over 30 years, I finally finished reading "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Garrison Keillor is right. The ending is dumb.
Dragging the comic relief of Tom Sawyer back into an otherwise serious story — perhaps the most important story in our history — was the 19th century version of jumping the shark. That Mark Twain. Always ahead of his time.
But every American should know that classic. And I managed to keep my focus all the way to the end once I got a version of the book for my then-new, zoomy and easy to carry Kindle reader.
I finally read "The Time Machine" and large bits of "On the Origin of Species" and "The Life of Samuel Johnson" the same way. Always meant to. Never got around to it.
So when Utah state Sen. Howard Stephenson pushes, as he did again last week, the argument that technology can help people learn things, I have to grant that he has a point.
Too bad he did so in a way that was hurtful and crude at almost Trumpian levels.
Stephenson was grousing that not enough of the state's public school teachers were taking to his preferred versions of computers that, in his mind, are the key to pushing Utah schools above current levels of mediocrity.
"Are we going to have to wait like Moses did," Thursday's Tribune quoted him as lamenting, "wandering 40 years in the wilderness for the old ones to die off before we can finally embrace this with fidelity?"
Fidelity?
The state has no business dictating particular bits of hardware or bytes of software for all schools, classes, teachers and students to use. The fact that Stephenson and others think it does leads many of us to suspect that it's less about reading and writing than it is about procurement and politics.
It is yet another example, in a state where resistance to federal meddling is gospel, of politicians having no qualms about micro-managing local government. And read together with the campaign from the Sutherland Institute, the one opposing any new money for Utah schools until they "reform," it looks like nothing so much as a way to flimflam voters into a belief that there's a silver bullet that will launch us into a Brave New World (haven't read that yet) of education.
And do so cheap and easy, once we get those fossilized teachers out of the way.
The "reform" we need is the legacy we have. Teachers, paid and otherwise treated like professionals, who have a large amount of the responsibility for the transmission of our culture into the future. Who have done it since Socrates argued that writing only interfered with his students' ability to memorize, think and debate.
"This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me."
(Wait. That wasn't Socrates. That was Eeyore.)
Since my college professors, even those in the social sciences, were encouraging us to get with the program and learn FORTRAN.
All this tech stuff is great. The sum of human knowledge (and foolishness) at your fingertips. Instant real-time communication around this world and beyond it. It's both super useful and dangerously addictive. So never fear that each generation won't adopt the latest version.
The danger is that, in the process of coming to worship what is essentially an expensive pencil, we will drift further away from our humanity. Which will happen all that much more quickly if we think that machines can replace, rather than supplement, human teachers.
They can't, any more than science and technology will ever be worth knowing without the humanities of art and literature. The point of education isn't knowing how to manipulate another machine. It's grasping, maybe in only a small measure, what it's like to be another person.
As I've written before, Huck Finn may be the ultimate example of just that. If more people read it because it's on a computer, that's wonderful.
The Tribune, like most journalistic enterprises today, is struggling to migrate from a strictly print environment to an increasingly digital one. The newest version of that will be rolling out any day now. Trust me. It's cool.
But it will all be for glorious naught if the online, mobile, app, brain implant version of The Tribune doesn't have lots of very important stuff to say. Stuff said by, and to, human beings.
Stick around. It's going to be interesting.